Our paper describes the results of a Social Return on Investment analysis of four new housing projects in Germany. A common characteristic of all projects is the central importance of mutual neighborly support to meet the demand for the assistance of older residents. All projects share some...

In this paper, we examine how parental health affects children's development of personality traits and problem behavior. Based on a German mother-and-child data base, we draw on observed parental health shocks as a more exogenous source of health variation to identify these effects and control...

We examine how parental health shocks affect children’s non-cognitive skills. Based on a German mother-and-child data base, we draw on significant changes in selfreported parental health as an exogenous source of health variation to identify effects on outcomes for children at ages of three...

This paper investigates the roles psychological biases play in empirically estimated deviations between subjective survival beliefs (SSBs) and objective survival probabilities (OSPs). We model deviations between SSBs and OSPs through age-dependent inverse S-shaped probability weighting functions...

The wage effects of fixed-term contracts (FTCs) are analysed with the GSOEP for West Germany. Different estimators which take into account selection bias are used. It is shown that propensity score matching estimators which are usually applied for the evaluation of active labour market...

There is a growing empirical literature studying whether fiscal rules reduce borrowing costs. Nevertheless, it remains an open question whether these rules are effective genuinely or just because they mirror fiscal preferences of politicians and voters. In our analysis of European bond spreads,...

Based on individual expectations from the Survey of Professional Forecasters, we construct a real-time proxy for expected term premium changes on long-term bonds. We empirically investigate the relation of these bond term premium expectations with expectations about key macroeconomic variables...

We ask whether a pay-as-you-go financed social security system is welfare improving in an economy with idiosyncratic productivity and aggregate business cycle risk. We show analytically that the whole welfare benefit from joint insurance against both risks is greater than the sum of benefits...

European banks are exposed to a substantial amount of risky sovereign debt. The "missing bank capital" resulting from the zero-risk weight exemption for European banks for European sovereign debt amplifies the co-movement between sovereign CDS spreads and facilitates cross-border...